False Consciousness Vs Free Will Psychology

This article discusses the concepts of false consciousness and free will in conjunction with the male gaze. It begins by discussing the different ways women have dealt with the pressures placed on them by men. The argument that the two authors created deals with women who have undergone elective mammoplasty surgery. They discuss how there are two feminist perspectives that connect to this surgery; false consciousness and free will perspective. “…for women to feel comfortable with their embodied self, they must find ways to change their physical self to better match their internalized sense of what are appropriate female body should look like” (Gagne and McGaughey, 202). Meaning, that if women do not feel comfortable in their own skin, they find ways to change their physical self to adhere to what they believe the female body should look like.
The authors discuss power between the false consciousness and free choice perspective. They look at different agents of beauty such as; “....media and fashion, their observations of other women, and their own perceptions of men’s observations of themselves and other women” (Gagne and McGaughey, 208). Meaning, these are where the women's’ perceptions came from. While interviewing the women, the authors noticed, that the women stated that they were influenced by certain things to want to undergo the elective mammoplasty surgery. Most of their responses were social factors, that aligned with the agents of beauty. With both of those things combined, women developed insecurities that they wanted to fix to fit the hegemonic beauty